If you already have MS Exchange just use OWA (outlook web access) feature to enable webaccess. but like suresh said its storage, directory services and mail traffic that matters most. regards syed. On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

400k is easy enough to do with either high end enterprise or low end carrier grade products.

Or if you have the patience to do it, open source ftw.

The MTA isn't the criterion here as much as all the other stuff - bandwidth, storage, directory services, security / antispam ...

--srs

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 7:43 AM, Santino Codispoti <santino.codispoti@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Does anyone happen to know what Microsoft using to delivery Hotmail? Is it Exchange?  Can anyone recommend a good system for developing web mail services?  I need something that can easy support 400K users

-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)

In which case, your best bet is to hire some sort of consultant to build it for you Or to outsource it to one of several white label providers who will host it and run it for you. --srs On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Santino Codispoti <santino.codispoti@gmail.com> wrote:

We do not have Exchange this would be for a consumer e-mail service that is ad supported.

-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)

What about starting with Zimbra's Open Source edition, and building onto it?

Let me just step in here and say.. it's tough to build onto Zimbra. At work, we support ~1000 users on Zimbra (network edition), with hundreds of thousands of messages flowing through daily, and it doesn't like you tinkering with stuff under the hood. Most of your customizations get blown away when you upgrade. That said, I know of some organizations who customize it like crazy (I had heard that Lycos's free mail system is Zimbra-based, and Yahoo as well). Once you deviate, though, don't expect to stick to Zimbra's releases. It might be easier to just start fresh with postfix, amavis, spamassassin, dovecot, etc. We've also run into some pain in scaling it out (they want you to use Red Hat Clustering, but there's no great way to scale out the mail store regardless). Ryan

Have a look at the Hermes mail system at cam.Ac.uk, built buy among people Philip Hazel of exam fame It will give you some insight into the challenges of building a scalable high perfomance mail system. Martin On Wednesday, 8 June 2011, Steve Spence <steve.spence@arkitechs.com> wrote:

That  what I found with most the open source /Linux  mail  products  that customizing  and extending can be difficult and a lot of time and effort. The  exchange is one of the easiest ways to roll out large scale web base email  if just  expensive in upfront  costs.

Interns of Hotmail  they initially  use to use  Solaris for the MTA and storage and FreeBSD for the web services ( Apache ) they suppose of migrated windows by now using windows products Again I think this highly customize solution which may not be very useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

we went through a similar  search for a high volume  solution which we could customize and brand  right now we using we high a hybrid of (exchange/Icewarp/Atmail/ two layers  of spam filtering )

Steve

-----Original Message----- From: Ryan Pugatch [mailto:rpug@linux.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 11:40 PM To: John LeCoque Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Hotmail?

...

What about starting with Zimbra's Open Source edition, and building onto it?

Let me just step in here and say.. it's tough to build onto Zimbra.  At work, we support ~1000 users on Zimbra (network edition), with hundreds of thousands of messages flowing through daily, and it doesn't like you tinkering with stuff under the hood.  Most of your customizations get blown away when you upgrade.  That said, I know of some organizations who customize it like crazy (I had heard that Lycos's free mail system is Zimbra-based, and Yahoo as well).  Once you deviate, though, don't expect to stick to Zimbra's releases.  It might be easier to just start fresh with postfix, amavis, spamassassin, dovecot, etc.  We've also run into some pain in scaling it out (they want you to use Red Hat Clustering, but there's no great way to scale out the mail store regardless).

Ryan

-- -- Martin Hepworth Oxford, UK

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Martin Hepworth <maxsec@gmail.com> wrote:

Have a look at the Hermes mail system at cam.Ac.uk, built buy among people Philip Hazel of exam fame

It will give you some insight into the challenges of building a scalable high perfomance mail system.

I rolled postfix, OpenLDAP, MySQL and @mail on a bunch of blades and NetApp storage which ran about 200K users for years without any problems. We had Alteons for load balancing. For spam/virus/etc I used the IronPort boxes (before they were Cisco). We very rarely had any problems with this, OpenLDAP broke once, but since the LDAP front ends were behind Alteons nobody ever noticed it. The whole thing cost less than the licenses for most commercial systems we looked at. -- Leigh Porter ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

On Wed, 8 Jun 2011 01:27:57 -0400, Steve Spence wrote:

That what I found with most the open source /Linux mail products that customizing and extending can be difficult and a lot of time and effort. The exchange is one of the easiest ways to roll out large scale web base email if just expensive in upfront costs.

Interns of Hotmail they initially use to use Solaris for the MTA and storage and FreeBSD for the web services ( Apache ) they suppose of migrated windows by now using windows products Again I think this highly customize solution which may not be very useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

we went through a similar search for a high volume solution which we could customize and brand right now we using we high a hybrid of (exchange/Icewarp/Atmail/ two layers of spam filtering )

As far as commercial packages go, Surgemail is worth a look. Very affordable and insanely powerful and customizable. The support team is the development team. It's not uncommon for bugs to be fixed in hours to day and even new features requests to be added in days to weeks. Runs on practically any major OS you prefer... -Vinny

Let me just step in here and say.. it's tough to build onto Zimbra. At work, we support ~1000 users on Zimbra (network edition), with hundreds of thousands of messages flowing through daily, and it doesn't like you tinkering with stuff under the hood. Most of your customizations get blown away when you upgrade. That said, I know of some organizations who customize it like crazy (I had heard that Lycos's free mail system is Zimbra-based, and Yahoo as well). Once you deviate, though, don't expect to stick to Zimbra's releases.

Seconded. In terms of functionality and interface, I like Zimbra a lot, but they make Microsoft and Apple look like amateurs in the "our way, or not all" game. As a small friends-and-family installation, I can't afford to dedicate a whole box exclusively to Zimbra[0], and trying to make it play nice with anything else running on the same server is a pain. As you say, pretty much anything that they don't have a GUI setting for is a nightmare to keep working across upgrades. I'd imagine it's actually better if you're planning a bigger-scale deployment and can have the architecture a lot more in line with how they expect it to be from the start. Regards, Tim. [0] OK, I probably could now with a VM, but the virtualisation support on my hosting box wasn't really there when I started...